Early in the formation of written communication techniques, when each character or letter was formed by a writing instrument in the hand of the writer, it became apparent that connecting one character or letter to the next with continuous stroking of the writing instrument without lifting the instrument from the substrate, greatly increased the speed and continuity of the printing process. Since in these earlier times the printing press and other now well known methods and apparatus for printing were unknown, each copy of a communication from the first to the last had to be made by individually taking the time to create each letter or character on the substrate or written material. The time saved by writing in cursive script, i.e. with one letter connected to the next, was very important. To this day most people can perform their individual scriven words faster and with greater ease when writing in script rather than by hand lettering unconnected letters or characters in manuscript.
With the development of the printing process, however the speed and facility for multiple copies reversed the emphasis and desirability of connecting letters and characters together. In the printing process from its early days to the present, letters and characters standing alone and unconnected from one to the next make the formation of the "master" much quicker and easier (whether it be set in metal type or created by photographic lithography or other technique).
This will be apparent from the fact that in "setting print," a term commonly used to define the establishment and creation of the printing master, the individual letters are selected from a supply or font containing one or more of each individual letter, character, or representation. Letters and characters which stand alone are much more easily selected and positioned in setting print. Since there is no loss in communication between lettered material and cursive written material, it has been the natural evolution that material intended to be printed seldom takes the form of cursive writing.
Today only a very small portion of the material which people read is in the form of cursive writing for the reasons stated above. Nevertheless, the individual person may still have the benefit of cursive writing when he or she is individually and personally creating scriven material. For this reason, and perhaps for reasons of tradition and a sense of the esthetic, cursive writing and penmanship is still taught and has been continuously taught with varying degrees of emphasis in the schools of the United States and the rest of the world.
The typical methods of teaching penmanship include instructing the pupils in the imitation of sample cursive written letters and characters. The sample letters and characters are those either produced by the teacher, which he or she learned by the same method of imitation, or those provided in textbooks and workbooks provided to the teacher and pupils by the publishing industry. For the most part penmanship is taught by the latter example, that is by the use of textbooks and workbooks.
The method and apparatus of this invention greatly improves and facilitates the printing of workbooks and textbooks and other materials where cursive script is to be printed by modern techniques of typesetting, including those methods known as photo typesetting. This invention in combination with computerized photo typesetting techniques may make the printing of cursive script simple enough that the trend to individual letter print may be reversed in favor of the esthetically pleasing and traditional style of cursive writing.
In the past in the United States two different methods of cursive script penmanship have predominated. These are the Zaner-Bloser and the Palmer Method. These methods take their names from the originators who by their hand created a style of writing letters and characters that came to be the accepted standards for teaching penmanship in the schoolrooms of the country. The Zaner-Bloser method has been taught by means of copied examples and photographic reproduction plates until this invention. The publisher of workbooks and textbooks prescribing the Zaner-Bloser method has relied on the skill of its employees which originated with the original creator of the penmanship style.
In the manuscript (printed letters) alphabet there are 26 lower case letters and 26 upper case letters as well as extra characters such as apostrophes, quotation marks, hyphens, etc. Since none of the letters or characters are connected to the adjacent one, each letter or character can be associated with each one of the other letters or characters.
On the other hand, in cursive writing, and particularly with the accepted standard of Zaner-Bloser penmanship, the letters are connected with a variety of ligatures. This variety of ligatures in acceptable penmanship and the complexity of type required to produce good ligature in the printing process has not been solved in the prior art.
The problems of acceptable ligature in the printing processes for cursive script have been approached in the prior patent art, but applicant is not aware of any patents addressing the problem of printing cursive writing using the letters of the English language and derivations. Patents of related general interest include U.S. Pat. No. 714,621, U.S. Pat. No. 3,699,518, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,111,646. U.S. Pat. No. 4,024,500 approaches the problem of ligature by adapting the characters and script to meet on a common line of ligature which is at the median or middle point of the character. Script writing typewriters produce a cursive script in which the difficult ligatures are omitted and the cursive written material does not take the form of acceptable penmanship as taught for the Zaner-Bloser or the Palmer Method. Apparently prior attempts toward the printing of cursive writing have been to adapt a penmanship to the necessities of the printing technique rather than adapt the printing techniques to the object of producing acceptable penmanship.